I was horribly heartbroken. And of course I was texting her. Not the latest interest of my adventures as a maturing, young, urban romantic but her: my best friend. Although she was three states away, I knew I could always trust her to listen to my pedantic and most of the time absolutely ridiculous love-life troubles. I typed out some text meant only for idiotic young adult novels or whiney Tumblr posts, and of course she read it.
She responded with the pigeon emoji. I responded with two pigeon emojis. She responded with three and soon we had an entire text conversation containing only the wonderfully ambiguous gray pigeon. Not a single word was exchanged in her latest pep-talk, but by the end of it, I had completely forgotten about my romantically challenged life.
I met her my sophomore year in high school. I was a 16-year-old full of angst and a passion for writing, and if John Hughes taught us anything, it is that those two go hand in hand. I never could have begun to conceive what the writing editor of my high school newspaper would become to me. As the years passed, my frat-star, Southern Tide-clad self would begin to transform with every band recommendation and novel discussion.
Band recommendations were where it started. In my musical naiveté, I would come to her with all my excitement, “Have you heard the band Grouplove?! What about Vampire Weekend?! Also there’s this band I heard the other day called Alt-J!”
She would simply slide out a small laugh behind her round glasses and reply with “Oh, bud.” That’s her saying. She calls everyone bud or kiddo, but she’s able to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a pretentious taste.
Pretty soon my literary adolescence would show when I would want to discuss works like "The Great Gatsby" or "Catcher in the Rye," and now with her being leagues ahead of me in a love for literature, I would find myself hearing the same “Oh, bud.” But I never minded hearing that because soon after I would come to her with titles like "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "The Inferno," which would actually merit a discussion.
The days now filled up with talks of music and novels, coffee over the cobblestones of Charleston and pigeon texts. And as we got closer, they also filled with talks of depression. Talks of loneliness. Talks of the world and what really awaits us out there.
I had spent all of high school looking for a girlfriend, someone to fill my life or make me feel important, and I went through many, each of them ending in some melodramatic fire sending my life into a constant swirl. I was always left feeling a sense of unstable loneliness in my life. That’s because I was a stupid teenager and couldn’t see that having a young love is overrated.
It’s almost impossible to keep a young love because it is almost impossible to keep our youth. Our years are fleeting and our emotions along with that. But no one has ever referred to their best friend as a young love.
After every little change in my life, she would be there with reassuring words, books, music, coffee and of course, pigeons. Recently she’s branched out to the grape emoji, but only because she likes to use the underused emojis. It’s in these moments that I see why it is so much more important to have a girl best friend than a girlfriend. I have been best friends with her for five years now, and two of those years spent at different schools and three states apart. I now consider myself a well-versed music aficionado thanks to her and a full blown literature nerd. And still, with every mishap I make, I can always rely on a little grey pigeon.
